Saturday, March 7, 2015

St. Patrick’s Day TREASURE HUNT

This is an activity I do with my 5-year-olds around St. Patrick’s Day.

Some days before, I preteach some related concepts like “leprechaun”, “shamrock” and “pot of gold” using flashcards and this lovely song . They already know “hat” and “rainbow”. We take some time to find Ireland in a map. If you google “Ireland” you’ll come up with some really fantastic images and they’ll really get the kids’ imagination going.

Then we make our “leprechaun hats”.

The kids colour the pictures and cut them out, then I make a construction paper headband and staple the hat and the other two pictures on it. Now everyone is wearing something green.

Then we “discover” the leprechaun’s letter somewhere in the classroom and read it.

We decide to find the pot of gold so we go looking for the shamrocks around the school. Previously, I’ve put several envelopes with a shamrock sign on them in different places. But when we find the first one and I try to open it, it won’t. On the envelope there’s a question or a task for them to do. This shouldn’t be too difficult or too easy for them. I usually use something like this: “Name 3 farm animals” (as it’s last year’s vocabulary, so they might need to think a bit to remember) or “What’s green and can jump and swim?”. When they answer the question correctly, the envelope “magically” opens and inside it says where the next shamrock is, for example “Look for another shamrock by the window”. And so on. I think I used 4 or 5 envelopes last year, you don’t want to make it last too long as you could lose the children’s attention.

So the last envelope tells us to look for the nearest tree. We go outside to the playground and under a tree we find… A pot of gold! (chocolate coins, of course). It’s also nice to hang some sort of rainbow on the tree.

Everyone gets a “gold” coin and we decide to leave the rest for the leprechaun.

Obviously, it takes a bit of a preparation in advance but kids really enjoy it so I think it’s worth it. I hope this year I can remember to take some pictures and post them here later.